The Four Phases of Playtesting
Playtesting is the act of exposing a game to the intended audience to collect data related to design flaws, balance issues, player strategies, and player feedback. When you get down to it, playtesting is the act of game design in action. It is the process of improving...
Paleovet Design Diary 4: Further Design Developments
It's been a while since I posted a Paleovet Design Diary, but work on the game hasn't stopped. In Paleovet Design Diary 4, we'll talk about how we've refined and finalized the mechanics of the game. Dinosaur Effects For starters, several dinosaur power got revised....
Paleovet Design Diary 3: The Current Mechanics
The final version of Paleovet was more of a refinement of the initial idea than an overhaul. You can read about previous versions in the previous Paleovet Design Diary. As it turns out, the simplest answer was often the right one for many of the mechanics: We...
Forest of Lost Children Zine Update
We are coming to the end of our journey in bringing our RPG zine to the world. The printed copies have arrived and are getting ready to get them all packed up and ready to mail out. Before that, however, we made a little video to show them off....
Board Gaming Online
In the past, we’ve talked about some tools to play role-playing games remotely. This time lets discuss something a little nearer and dearer to our hearts, playing board games remotely. Thanks to the internet it is a lot easier than you might think. Game by Video Call...
Producing an RPG Zine Adventure
In this post, I’m going to talk a bit about the process of producing this RPG Zine. I’ll discuss our process, the tools we used, and a bit of what we learned along the way.
Bringing your RPG Online
Over the past five weeks of isolation, things can get a bit lonely Thankfully we live in the age of the internet which makes remote gaming a possibility. You can run amazing RPG sessions with your friends without anyone ever leaving home. So, let’s talk about some of the great tools that help you run your RPG online.
Building Good RPG Puzzles
Puzzles can be so many things: a coded message, the method for turning off the traps in a vault, or even the mystery of who killed the king. It is all just a matter scale. So, let us talk about building good RPG puzzles.
Our Approach to Game Art and Style
A glimpse into how Absurdist Productions decides on their game art.
Designing an RPG Adventure
The Forest of Lost Children zine is nearly ready to send off to the printers. So I’ve been thinking about how I actually design adventures. Now much like the way I design board games, I always start with the theme in mind for every decision. Am I going for a...